What advice do you have for building an "A-team" with women?

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When it comes to building an A-team with women, I have three piece of advice;

The first piece of advice is that we tend to hire men on potential and women on track record. So what that means is that if you're looking at women and if you're thinking 'I'm not sure if she can do it' - just remember or flip it and say, 'if this were a man, would I be willing to hire them?' and then put the women in the slot.

The next thing I want you to consider, and again this goes back to men vs. women, women have to be two and a half times more competent than a man in order to be judged on equal footing. So if you're even close in terms of judging them on competency, tuck away in your brain that in fact this woman is probably incredibly competent and you want her on your team.

The third piece of advice that I want to say to you is that because women have in general or historically been the minority in the workforce, they have learned to do things like play where no one else is playing and that's actually the very first tenant of disrupting yourself. So women are comfortable taking market risks, they are comfortable playing where no one else is playing, doing things that other people aren't doing.

And so, if you're willing to build an A-team or you want to build an A-team and you've got women on your team, they are going to take those right kinds of risks. They're not necessarily going to compete, but they are going to create whole new markets.

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Recognized as one of the 50 leading business thinkers in the world (Thinkers50), Whitney Johnson is an expert on disruptive innovation and personal disruption; specifically, a framework which she codifies in the critically acclaimed book Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work and in her latest book Build an “A” Team: Play To Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve.